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Sonos forces post-purchase privacy policy change

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Revision as of 00:49, 1 March 2025 by Shingo (talk | contribs) (Fixed citation punctuations.)

Background

Sonos, Inc. specializes in the manufacture of audio devices many of which are connected to the internet and provide "smart" features. Using those features inevitably provides Sonos with data on the users of their products.

Changes to the privacy statement

Very interestingly, the only 2 sentences that were emboldened in the May 2022 Sonos privacy statement[1] that were NOT emboldened in the March 2023 Sonos privacy statement are the following: "We do not and will not sell your personal data to third parties." on page 1 of the statement; and "Sonos does not and will not sell personal information about our customers." on page 11 of the 2022 privacy statement and page 12 of the 2023 privacy statement.[2] This change in text formatting is not present in any of the 100 other emboldened sentences and titles.

This holds significance given the following event:

On March 2023 Sonos' privacy statement stated, on page 12 of 35 under the "How We May Share Personal Information" section: "We do not and will not sell your personal data to third parties".[2] That privacy policy was updated on June 2024 and said sentence was removed from the section as well as from Privacy Statement as a whole.[3] It is worth noting that the "Why?" section on the reasons Sonos collects user data has substantially changed between revisions and, in the 2024 version, it includes a balancing test [What?] and allows Sonos to "... enable you to select the right music service options based on your geographic location.". This new wording also does not explicitly prevent Sonos from sharing/selling user data to third parties.

A question present in the FAQ section attached to the April 2018 Sonos, Inc. Privacy Statement. The same section was no longer attached to future iterations of the Privacy Statement.

Consumers were then forced to agree to the new terms of service if they wanted to be able to continue using the Sonos product that they had already bought and paid for. There was no option to "disagree" or "opt out" of the agreement and continue using the product as usual after the terms of the privacy statement were changed.[4][citation needed - Second souce of this behaviour]

Terms of use agreement prompt after change.

See Also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 4.Sonos, Inc. Privacy Statement 2022 (PDF). Sonos. May 2022.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Sonos, Inc. Privacy Statement 2023" (PDF). Sonos. March 2023. Archived (PDF) from the original on 14 Jan 2025. Retrieved 19 Feb 2025.
  3. ↑ "Sonos, Inc. Privacy Statement 2024" (PDF). Sonos. June 2024. Archived (PDF) from the original on 14 Jan 2025. Retrieved 19 Feb 2025.
  4. ↑ Rossmann, Louis (13 June 2024). "Sonos removes restriction on selling personal data & forces users to accept new TOS🤦". Youtube.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
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